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Topic: Favorite Music Videos (Read 79986 times)

mogwai

When MTV launched on August 1, 1981, the first music video it played was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles. What an awful video. In those days, all a music video needed was jiggly girls in bikinis, big hair, fast cars, and if you were lucky, jiggly girls with big hair driving fast cars. No huge costs, just a little something to complement the listening experience.

Then came along Michael Jackson's "Thriller" in 1983. "Thriller" wasn't a music video, it was a full-fledged crotch-grabbing experience. At 14 minutes long, "Thriller" suddenly opened the doors of creativity, proving that a music video could be more about the video and less about the music. Today, companies will spend millions of dollars to make a 3-minute video (most of it spent on computer animation and huge sets). We are proud to present a list of opulent indulgence: the 10 most expensive music videos of all time.

To be fair, though, we've instituted some ground rules:

1. A group/artist can only appear once on the list. Known as the Michael Jackson Amendment, this rule makes the list a whole lot more interesting. But artists doing a one-time collaboration with others are fair game (allowing Janet Jackson to pop up 3 times).

2. If the video is for a song from a movie, then it doesn't count. Otherwise, Celine Dion's warbling of "My Heart Will Go On" would win hands down (because it included expensive scenes from Titanic). To qualify, the images in the video must have been created solely for that video.

3. Studios lie about how much they spend. They don't want to seem too wasteful, so our figures are probably a little off. But it's an interesting list anyway, so deal with it.

10. "Girlfriend/Boyfriend"Cost: $1,500,000+Artist: Blackstreet (featuring Janet Jackson) This video is completely computer animated, taking place inside a pinball machine. The basic "plot" is that Blackstreet and Janet Jackson feel like pinballs, bouncing uncontrollably through their lives, when it's all really just a game. What made it so expensive? Well, computer animation ain't cheap, and neither is Janet Jackson (the same cannot be said about sibling Latoya . . .)

An 11-minute video extravaganza, this video tells the supposed tale of singer Axl Rose and model Stephanie Seymour getting married, having a party, and living out their lives together until death. And all it took was 11 minutes? . . . A classy video that combines storytelling with live concert performances, Guns N' Roses actually paid for the video themselves, to insure that it looked as they envisioned.

While their video "Waterfalls" was technologically more groundbreaking, "Unpretty" ended up costing more because the group argued over every little detail (almost doubling the projected cost). The story of the video starts out with women in a plastic surgeon's office contemplating breast implants, but they somehow get involved in a gang fight in a back alley. All the while, TLC sits on these weirdo floating pods while doing yoga chants. Nobody said these videos have to make sense . . .

7. "She's a Bitch"Cost: $2,000,000+Artist: Missy Elliot For some videos, you have no idea where the money went. What made it cost so much? Greedy accountant skim off the top? Tons of footage never used? Missy Elliot's "She's a Bitch" is a perfect example of such confusion. A rap song that essentially features Miss Missy mugging for the camera in a rubber body suit (or dancing on an M-shaped stage with her Missy-ettes), how this video ended up costing $2 mil is a mystery.

Will Smith is notorious for spending googobs on his music videos, especially because they often serve the dual purpose of promoting his movies. The video to "Wild Wild West" cost $3 million alone, and the video to "Men In Black" is also up there. Of course, such videos aren't allowed placement on our list, but they go to show that Will Smith is no stranger to spending money on his videos. For "Miami," Smith chose to follow the ever-popular path of using computer morphing techniques, sending the budget sky-rocketing. The entire video consists of the Fresh Prince morphing from location to location (we counted at least 40 morphs), and each morph costs about $14,000. The sad thing is, the song ain't that great.

Fine, fine, they're all hotties. No use denying it. But unlike their competitor über-boybands *NSync and 98°, the Backstreet Boys are actually pretty good (they were even nominated for a Grammy for their second smash album, "Millennium," proving that they have industry respect). The Backstreet Boys made more money in 1999 than any other entertainer, $66 million, so dropping $2 mil on a video is chump change. In "Larger Than Life," the story is that the B-Boys are space-fighting robots in some bizarro Star Wars meets Voltron cyberworld. Replete with computer animation and special effects, it doesn't make much sense but it looks pretty cool.

A tremendously cool video involving tons of special effects that Busta Rhymes co-directed. The story involves Busta (as some kind of morphy glass creature) hookin' up with Janet (also a morphy glass creature). They sing, they morph, they sing, and they morph a little more, and at the end of the video, they both explode into little glass shards. Gross. But in a good way.

The visuals are reminiscent of movies like The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day in which a humanoid creature is able to change its appearance, yet still appear completely believable. In "What's It Gonna Be," Janet and Busta are constantly mushing around each other, sometimes transparent (like glass), sometimes reflective (like mirrors). Believe us, you can see where the $2.4 million went.

Here's a video that makes almost no sense. Mariah starts out on a movie date with B-level star Jerry O'Connell, when some hoodlums start throwing popcorn at them. To escape the trauma, Mariah runs to the bathroom, where she encounters her evil twin (portrayed by Mariah in a black wig). Good Mariah and Evil Mariah start getting all Jackie Chan on each other, when they turn into cartoons. Then the video ends.

Much like Missy Elliot's "She's a Bitch," we have no idea why this video turned out to be so expensive. We can only suspect that the first version stunk, so they probably did some re-shooting. We would've hated to see the first version, though.

"Victory," like 5 others of the videos on this list, is a rap video, and what a rap video "Victory" is. It has everything, including exploding airplanes, suicidal leaps from buildings, helicopters, and shootouts. Like much of Puff Daddy's repertoire, this video is about a man's escape from the police who are wrongly accusing him of a crime. As P.D. runs across the city's rooftops, a bunch of snobs in a party look out the window at the ensuing action, obviously wishing that they had such excitement in their lives. And playing through the background of the entire video is an opera aria that lends the entire video a dramatic flair. While it may not have much computer animation, this video definitely has a "movie feel" to it; this level of detail is what makes the video cost so much, and seem so cool.

Building an airplane and blowing it up: $55,000 Pyrotechnic special effects: $100,000 Artificial rain: $10,000 Helicopter rental: $21,000 Stuntman fee: $5,000 per jump from building to building Security on the set: $10,000

Michael Jackson's videos have always been ridiculously expensive. In 1983, he spent $800,000 on "Thriller," which would be about $1.4 million today. But remember that before "Thriller," no one even came close to spending that kind of money, and he had to do it with limited technological capabilities. As technology improved, Jacko's videos became more expensive, spending over $1.2 million on "Black or White" in 1992, and even more on "Remember The Time." But if he can keep an oxygen chamber, a petting zoo, the Elephant Man's bones, and an entire plastic surgery team in his mansion, it's certainly no biggie to drop another $7 mil on a video with his sister.

"Scream's" $7,000,000 price tag is more than twice as much as the next most expensive music video (Puff Daddy's "Victory" at $2.7 million), and it's easy to see why: he spent $5 million alone on 11 sets. Yet while watching the video, it all seems incredibly wasteful, not coming close to the film quality of "Thriller", "November Rain," or "Victory."

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands, with all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves, let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Thanks, I'll have to look into it. I think it's one of the best videos I've ever seen.

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Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands, with all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves, let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Anyone seen Icubus' "Megalomaniac" vid? It's a great mixed media video. I don't agree with the message, but it's very artistic and very powerful.

the girl who directed it (her name escapes me now and i'm too lazy to look it up) directed a beautiful video for sigur ros.

Floria Sigismondi?

My favorite Sigur Ros vid (and one of my favorites of all time) would be the one for "Viorar vel til loftarasa."

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""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Capra tells us that, in effect, love's dreams are only dreams and that they will never quite bear translation into practical forms of relationship and expression. They will never be realized in the world but only in our consciousness and in our most daring and glorious works of art - but that, for Capra, is no reason to abandon love's dreams. --Ray Carney, American Vision: The Films Of Frank Capra

i really like everything that shynola has directed, but specially blur's good song. that video has the most heartbreaking love story i have ever seen, forr real, and its enhanced by the art of David Shrigley. good stuff.

besides that one, i'd say that with videos is the newer the better.

*star guitar by youknowwho*obviously evil by interpol (directed by a person named charlie white)

"As a matter of fact I only work with the feeling of something magical, something seemingly significant. And to keep it magical I don't want to know the story involved, I just want the hypnotic effect of it somehow seeming significant without knowing why." - Len Lye